4 ms·

Over the years I have learned and dipped my toes in many programming languages, and I'd need some kind of reason to look into yet another language. What are Rak

by msvan 6y ago

Over the years I have learned and dipped my toes in many programming languages, and I'd need some kind of reason to look into yet another language. What are Raku's main contributions to the programming language design space that I probably haven't seen elsewhere?

sigzero 6y ago
Maybe grammars? You'd have to research. https://docs.raku.org/language/grammars https://docs.raku.org/language/grammars
tsjq 6y ago
It is Perl
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cutler 6y ago
Hyperoperators by The Damian.
jinpa_zangpo 6y ago
Rational numbers instead of floating point as the default real type.
- db48x 6y ago
  That's not exactly a new innovation though; Lisp has had a whole numeric tower for a few decades now…
  - raiph 6y ago
    I was taught in school that `0.1` is rational. Afaik it isn't in any lisps. I think that's the point the GP was making. That said, while making `0.1 + 0.2 - 0.3` come out as exactly zero, with a clean and principled way to avoid things going pathological when the denominator gets large, is nice, it's hardly one of Raku's "main contributions to the programming language design space that I probably haven't seen elsewhere?"! :)
donaldihunter 6y ago
Gradual / optional type declaration, grammars as a first class language feature, async / parallel programming, rational numbers, lazy evaluation, OOP with classes and roles and an underlying metaobject protocol.
- olah_1 6y ago
  The real bummer about optional typing is that it doesn’t speed up the program. I used it all over thinking that I was “optimizing” or helping the compiler. Really I was creating more work for it.
  - donaldihunter 6y ago
    The goal is definitely that it can enable greater optimisation and I agree that it's not a reality yet. The other benefit is that it constrains types so that you get compile time type checking, which is very useful.
  - p6steve 6y ago
    typing, roles/inheritance and multi dispatch together offer a very clean coding model that cuts through the usual if-then-else wool
anewaccount2021 6y ago
Raku incorporates many of the neatest ideas in languages but retains a perlish flavor. I would almost equate it with Racket, in that there is support for many styles of coding, and your code may look nothing like another's. TMTOWTDI is fundamental to the perl philosophy so if you prefer total consistency, you are probably better off with python or go.
zem 6y ago
phasers are very neat https://docs.raku.org/language/phasers https://docs.raku.org/language/phasers
p6steve 6y ago
great question @msvan - raku has many ... for me the unique genius of raku is to have stolen all of the best parts of type system, OO, grammars & regex, functional and procedural coding and jammed them into one smoothly integrated syntax
raiph 6y ago
It's core concept cake (like a "concrete turing machine model" counterpart to lisp 1.5's half page of lambda calculus definition) combined with the mutable braid of mutable PLs icing.[0] [0] https://gist.github.com/raiph/849a4a9d8875542fb86df2b2eda89296 https://gist.github.com/raiph/849a4a9d8875542fb86df2b2eda892...

by msvan 6y ago

sigzero 6y ago

Maybe grammars? You'd have to research. https://docs.raku.org/language/grammars https://docs.raku.org/language/grammars

tsjq 6y ago

It is Perl

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cutler 6y ago

Hyperoperators by The Damian.

jinpa_zangpo 6y ago

Rational numbers instead of floating point as the default real type.

db48x 6y ago
That's not exactly a new innovation though; Lisp has had a whole numeric tower for a few decades now…
- raiph 6y ago
  I was taught in school that `0.1` is rational. Afaik it isn't in any lisps. I think that's the point the GP was making. That said, while making `0.1 + 0.2 - 0.3` come out as exactly zero, with a clean and principled way to avoid things going pathological when the denominator gets large, is nice, it's hardly one of Raku's "main contributions to the programming language design space that I probably haven't seen elsewhere?"! :)

donaldihunter 6y ago

Gradual / optional type declaration, grammars as a first class language feature, async / parallel programming, rational numbers, lazy evaluation, OOP with classes and roles and an underlying metaobject protocol.

olah_1 6y ago
The real bummer about optional typing is that it doesn’t speed up the program. I used it all over thinking that I was “optimizing” or helping the compiler. Really I was creating more work for it.
- donaldihunter 6y ago
  The goal is definitely that it can enable greater optimisation and I agree that it's not a reality yet. The other benefit is that it constrains types so that you get compile time type checking, which is very useful.
- p6steve 6y ago
  typing, roles/inheritance and multi dispatch together offer a very clean coding model that cuts through the usual if-then-else wool

anewaccount2021 6y ago

Raku incorporates many of the neatest ideas in languages but retains a perlish flavor. I would almost equate it with Racket, in that there is support for many styles of coding, and your code may look nothing like another's. TMTOWTDI is fundamental to the perl philosophy so if you prefer total consistency, you are probably better off with python or go.

zem 6y ago

phasers are very neat https://docs.raku.org/language/phasers https://docs.raku.org/language/phasers

p6steve 6y ago

great question @msvan - raku has many ... for me the unique genius of raku is to have stolen all of the best parts of type system, OO, grammars & regex, functional and procedural coding and jammed them into one smoothly integrated syntax

raiph 6y ago

It's core concept cake (like a "concrete turing machine model" counterpart to lisp 1.5's half page of lambda calculus definition) combined with the mutable braid of mutable PLs icing.[0] [0] https://gist.github.com/raiph/849a4a9d8875542fb86df2b2eda89296 https://gist.github.com/raiph/849a4a9d8875542fb86df2b2eda892...